Optimal Meta Strategy

As a whole, Beast Games is 99% luck. Only 0.1% of players win the $5 million, and while there are a few rare instances where some skills or social games can help, the vast majority of games are almost entirely or entirely luck-based. Even the trivia section was based on a single question that any individual player may or may not have knowledge of. Even the Final 10 tower negotiation game was based on the luck of the rationality and sanity of your opponents. Most of the time, individual players can't control who they play with and it's incredibly easy to lose from random bullshit.

So the optimal meta strategy is to maximize your social acumen based on the idiocy of other players, and then opportunistically take any money offered. This means that you should present yourself as playing with honor/integrity, which means refusing to take bribes, refusing to purposefully eliminate other people, talking about how much you love every other player, and deferring to luck-based games as much as possible. It's crucial to not just present yourself as honorable, but to shame anyone who isn't playing by that definition of honorable, and try to hype other players into the shaming as well. This creates an aura of honor that may save you when other idiotic "honorable" players come to your aid.

However, as soon as an opportunity arises to take literally any amount of money over $5K (EDIT - the expected value of 0.001*5 million), you should absolutely do it. Take literally any amount of money in the opening, or wait for the $100K if you want to gamble a bit. Take the $1 million to knock out 25% of players. Take the $500K like that (smart) guy did on the pirate ship. Take the full $1 million during the "everyone stays in their own house and draws from a common money pile" game.

I'm interested in hearing any flaws in this analysis.